Brad Crawford

Name: Brad Crawford
Alias: Oracle
Ethnicity: American
Occupation: Assassin/Bodyguard
Affiliation: Schwarz
Organization: Eszett
Ability: Precognition
Japanese VA: Okiayu Ryoutarou
English VA: Michael Tremain

Brad Crawford (ブラッドクロフォード), mostly referred to by just his last name of "Crawford" is the leader of the assassin group known as Schwarz. Schwarz are the anti-thesis and enemies of the protagonists, Weiss. Scwarz is made up of a group of deadly assassins who also boast supernatural abilities. Crawford, codenamed "Oracle" is gifted with the ability to see small glimpses into the future. He is a very driven individual and does not like anything, or anyone, to mess with his carefully laid plans. Crawford's ability to see glimpses into the future make him a very formidable opponent as he thinks several moves ahead and has the ability to confirm whether or not these plans will come to fruition.

Unlike the other assassins in Weiss Kreuz, who all primarily use a variety of unique weapons or their special abilities to fight with, Crawford's weapon of choice is a gun. That is not to say that Crawford is inexperianced with hand-to-hand combat, quite the opposite actually. Crawford's fighting style incorporates boxing with some basic martial arts techniques. This, paired with his precognitive abilities make him a very deadly and dangerous opponent in a fight as he is able to see his opponents moves, before they occur, and move to counter them.

Verbrechen & Strafe

Verbrechen & Strafe (Crime and Punishment) is the OVA and is set some time after the events in the original series. Schwarz does not make an appearance until the very end (only Crawford and Schuldig appear) and play no significant role in the story.

Weiss Kreuz: Glühen

Weiss Kreuz Glühen is the follow-up to the original twenty-five episode series that ran on TV Tokyo in 1998. Glühen aired in Japan on Kids Network from November 28, 2002 to February 20, 2003 and consisted of thirteen episodes. As you can see by the image to your right, Crawford's character design underwent some radical changes.

This time around, the series had a much larger budget to spend on animation and writing of the series and Glühen is noted for it's vast improvement in animation and image quality. However, a lawsuit arose when the character designs created for the anime by Tsuchiya Kyoko were used again in Glühen without her permision let alone compensation. Tsuchiya Kyoko took Koyasu Takehito, the creator of Weiss Kreuz, to court over the re-usage of her designs and ultimately won. Rather than pay an exhuberant fee to Tsuchiya over the character design on top of the court costs, Koyasu opted instead to have all new designs created for Glühen.

In Glühen, Crawford and his teammates do not make an appearance in the series until the last couple of episodes when it is revealed that Schwarz is now a part of Kritiker, the agency that Weiss works for. Crawford, Nagi, and Schuldig show up to assist Weiss in taking down three body guards from Ezett with strong supernatural abilities who stand between Weiss and their target.

Rumors

1. Crawford's Precognition is infalliable, there isn't a move that his enemies make that he cannot see.

This is not true. Through out the series we are given instances where Crawford notes how annoying Weiss' interferrence is. While, generally Weiss is unable to stop them for the most part, they do tend to hinder and mess up Crawford's plans to an extent. The most notable instance that shows Crawford is not infalliable occurs towards the end of episode number 25, "Ende Des Weiss: To The Knights..." when Manx is able to slip in and shoot Crawford's hand, thus preventing him from killing Sakura. Double-teaming Crawford has not always worked, as seen in other episodes, but in this instance Crawford was completely unable to predict the next move an enemy would make.

2. Crawford is a former American pro-football player in the NFL.

That is a completely fannon (fan made) concept that has gotten far out of control. So much so that even Wikipedia has an inaccurate page up and citing this false information as fact. Yes, there is a real-life former NFL player by the name of Brad Crawford, but he is a real person where as Brad Crawford "Oracle" of Weiss Kreuz is a purely fictional character. Who would have thought that the actions of a single fangirl who pulled some real-life information to use to give Crawford a back story in her fanfiction would backfire so tremendously.